Pulling Out the Emerald City

As books become electronic, and public-domain texts are as easy to find online as ads for World of Warcraft, one response for print publishers is to make their books into beautiful objects—luxury goods that readers will want not just for the content but for the form and for what they say about their owners.

Among these ventures seems to be the Penguin Threads line, which describes itself this way (minus the all-caps):

Commissioned by award-winning Penguin art director Paul Buckley, the Penguin Threads series debuted with cover art by Jillian Tamaki and continues with art by Rachell Sumpter for gift-worthy Penguin classics. Sketched out in a traditional illustrative manner, then hand stitched using needle and thread, the final covers are sculpt embossed for a tactile, textured, and beautiful book design that will make truly special gifts and will be welcome additions to any craft or literature lover’s collection.

Last month Sumpter gave a publicity interview to the Huffington Post about one project, sharing some rejected designs and a picture of her work in progress. The public-domain book was an omnibus of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Emerald City of Oz, and Glinda of Oz. The canned interviewer asked:

In your own words, what is this book about?

A child figures out the rules of a strange land and helps others believe in themselves after getting stranded. She goes on a quest to return home. She’s reluctant to be exceptional, the person everyone in Oz thinks she is. Believes strongly that she is normal. Always does what is right. I think it’s a child’s perspective of how to be a hero.

What was the mood, theme or specific moment from the text you depicted with this cover? 

This is Dorothy and her companions approaching the Emerald City. Oz is such a dense world, it was challenging to pick out one moment. There are important elements from other parts in the book also. The poppies are so iconic and beautiful I had to include them. I also wanted to include the four main heroes since the book is about how they support one another.

Although Sumpter had created some noted book covers before, particularly for books associated with McSweeney’s, she didn’t have that much experience in stitchwork or embroidery design.

That may be one reason this cover strikes me as busy and unattractive. The approach to the Emerald City along the Yellow Brick Road is an iconic American image, but this mass of blobby colors doesn’t evoke that cultural memory. Though it’s possible to pick out the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion in the bottom half of the scene, Dorothy’s faceless figure appears as just another blob and Toto’s an asterisk.

Sumpter does a better job with The Wind in the Willows, showing Mr. Toad at the wheel, and Tamacki’s Black Beauty brings an older Penguin Classics look to the new medium.

Moorcock: “the prose of the nursery-room”

From Michael Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh,” as archived at Revolution SF (it was originally written in 1978, revised in 1989, and revised again to note recent authors):

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:

One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan).

Unlike the tone of E. Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy.

Wait a minute! Milne’s characterization of Eeyore is hilarious. But his narrative voice is indeed the voice of an adult looking back/down on childhood. Nesbit’s narrative voice, on the other hand, is an author in conspiracy with young readers.

Perhaps the “voice of the nursery-room” is one reason why some of the novels Moorcock mentions—Lord of the Rings and Watership Down among them—are treated as books for young people even though their authors conceived them as books for adults.

“It’s Already In My Pocket” Appeal

From a posting by Andrew Karre at CarolRhoda Books on the future of books:

Now that every carrier has what David Pogue calls an app phone on one of the three major platforms (Apple, Android, and Blackberry—four if you count Windows Mobile) and now that they’re competing on price, I suspect we’ll see more teens with phone capable of downloading ebooks from retailers and libraries.

Teens are used to text on LCD screens, and I don’t think they’re likely to respond to the “it looks like paper” appeal of Kindle’s epaper nearly as much as they’re going to respond to the “it’s already in my pocket” appeal of a smartphone.

The “in my pocket” factor also affects the appeal of the new but backpack-sized iPad for readers who still have eyes good enough to read long texts on smartphone screens. And that device still has an adult price as well.

I think Karre is correct that the “feels like a book” factor isn’t that important, especially for younger readers. Last year I used my PDA to reread Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for the first time since childhood—a Gutenberg text, nothing with special formatting. It was an odd experience, but I don’t think that was a result of the mix of forward-looking book format and backward-looking book. That’s just a weird book.

Onion Sauce! Onion Sauce!

In Sunday's Boston Globe, Katherine A. Powers elegantly dissects the two competing annotated editions of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows out now--Seth Lerer's from Norton and Annie Gauger's from the Belknap Press.

And, like a surgical dissection, the patients don't survive the procedure that well. Powers writes:

neither editor seems really at home in the world that gave rise to "The Wind in the Willows." Though they are forever supplying definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary, neither appears to have looked up "metalled," both believing that a "metalled road" has something to do with metal (rather than broken stone).

Lerer, clearly no student of Mrs. Beeton (who recommends onion sauce as the best accompaniment for rabbit dishes), believes that Mole's taunting the rabbits who annoy him with "Onion Sauce! Onion sauce!" is the equivalent of his saying "hogwash," going on to say, apropos of nothing in the story, that "By the nineteenth century, onion-sauce had come to represent the simplicity of home cooking, in contrast to the fancy cuisine of court or the Continent."

For her part, Gauger does not recognize vegetable marrows, once a staple of the British table (alas), speculating that those shown in an illustration by Arthur Rackham could be "water-melon sized cucumbers or giant leeks."

In possibly my favorite part of the book, the animal friends surge forth to retake Toad Hall from the weasels, stoats, and ferrets. Mild-mannered, home-loving Mole, now "black and grim, brandishing his stick," shouts "his awful war-cry, 'A Mole! A Mole!'"--echoing Scottish warriors of yore whose battle cry was their clan name.

For Gauger, however, "This odd war cry resembles one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare's Richard III . . . 'A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!'" This makes no sense at all and, worse, misses a very good joke.

For another complaint that Lerer hasn't done his homework in the field of children's literature, see Perry Nodelman's remarks quoted in this post.

Gaiman on Milne on Grahame

With the twentieth anniversary of The Sandman comics, new novels coming out, an upcoming gig on the last days of Batman, and a movie adaptation of Coraline under way, Neil Gaiman is on a roll. But this 2001 interview with the online magazine January shows he has a keen sense of how popular authors can be forgotten:

1930. Probably the most prominent English essayist was A. A. Milne: the editor of Punch, famed for his comedic essays, and a man with several plays running in the West End concurrently. A man who had bestselling books with titles like The Daily Round and hilarious collections of essays and sketches. One of the funniest writers of his generation and an accomplished playwright.

I did an Amazon search several months ago just out of interest to see just what of his was actually in print. And it listed 700 books: all of which, as I went down page after page, were variant editions of the two Winnie the Pooh books and the two books of comic verse for children that he wrote. And that's all that we have left of A. A. Milne, and he's in better shape than most of his contemporaries whose names we do not remember at all. . . .

There's one other thing we remember [Milne] for. His attempt to revive something forgotten which, again, worked brilliantly. To the point now where we didn't even know that it ever was forgotten. He wrote Toad of Toad Hall as a stage play, because he loved--and was furious that it had been forgotten--The Wind in the Willows.

And Kenneth Grahame's book came out [in 1908] and was a huge dud. Kenneth Grahame's other two books--Dream Days [1898] and The Golden Age [1895]--now completely forgotten. Portraits of sort of being a child in early Edwardian, Victorian days--were seized on and loved by the Edwardians as these beautiful, sentimental portraits of childhood. These were Grahame's bestselling books.

And The Wind in the Willows was a dud: it was completely forgotten to the point where A.A. Milne wound up writing an essay in the 1920s saying: Let me tell you about one of the best books in the world, and you have never heard of it. It was called The Wind in the Willows, and [Milne] went on and did Toad of Toad Hall, the theatrical adaptation, which then revived the book to the point where it's now considered one of the great children's classics.

Actually, I own Grahame's Dream Days and The Golden Age, with Maxfield Parrish illustrations. Gaiman is right that the text hasn't survived as well. The same sentimentality plays better with water rats and moles.